Subway Car

ARTICLES ABOUT SUBWAY CAR BY DATE - PAGE 2

By Stevenson Swanson, Tribune national correspondent | October 24, 2004

More than any other American city, this is the place where people ride in a hole in the ground. It's the city where the rumble of a subway car is part of the lullaby of Broadway. And how do you get to Harlem? You take the "A" train, of course. New York's subway is out of sight, but it is rarely out of mind. Celebrated in song and featured in movies and television shows, the underground railroad is so thoroughly woven into the fabric of life here that it comes as a surprise to many New Yorkers that it is turning 100 years old this week.

The Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein liked to parody the modernist styles of his day. So it's altogether appropriate that five years after his death, he has given the new Times Square, with its sci-fi glass towers and Tomorrowland electronic signs, a monumental mural that harkens to a bygone future -- the future as it was envisioned in the machine age. Even the helmeted head of Buck Rogers, that Depression-era space traveler, appears in "Times Square...

Kellogg Co. has come up with a new twist on targeted advertising. Consider it the angel/devil-on-your-shoulder method of media placement. Looking for more impact from an image overhaul for its Nutri-Grain breakfast bars, Kellogg and its agency, Leo Burnett USA, have crafted the brand's first outdoor strategy that targets the on-the-go customer at the point where so-called "bad food options" lurk. So if you're rushing for a train and only have time for a quick bite--say, a doughnut--Kellogg's plan is for you to see one of their ads nearby.

"NYPD Blue": At first glance it seems a bold gesture for the ABC cop series to go an extra half-hour, to 90 minutes, tonight (8:30 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7). But then you take into consideration the network's troubles with the rest of Tuesday night and realize it would probably prefer that its best series of the evening fill all three prime-time hours. Further pushing the skepticism dial, the episode, the finale of a two-parter that began Nov. 25, carries a subplot, a secondary case, that robs it of much of its potential power.

No town assumes a clearer link between genius and wacko phobias than New York. Woody Allen, David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld are among those who personify a purported rich mix of brilliance and neurosis, as the Dec. 4 New York Observer makes clear in "Welcome to Neurotic N.Y.! Don't Touch That Doorknob." A sprightly weekly newspaper, heavy on political and cultural news and analysis, suggests that the city may well be Cuckoo Central in a kidding-on-the-square piece that notes that an estimated 19,000 New Yorkers seek treatment annually for various weird anxieties.

People in Paris are living in fear these days. A subway blast last Tuesday injured 29 people -- and it was the latest blast in a terrifying wave of bombings. The bombings, which began in July, have left seven people dead and 160 injured. They have turned France's capital city into an armed fortress, with hundreds of soldiers on the streets. The government says that's the only way to fight the terrorists. No one immediately claimed responsibility for Tuesday's blast, but most of the seven previous bombings or attempted bombings were claimed by Algerian militants.

A police officer who said he was depressed opened fire on rush-hour passengers in a subway car Thursday, shooting three to death, authorities said. The alleged killer, 22-year-old Ernesto Cruz Jimenez, fired off 10 rounds as the train stood at the La Raza Metro stop in northern Mexico City, said Alfonso Nieto of the local attorney general's office. Five people were wounded in the attack. As Cruz was walking from the scene, an unarmed subway policeman sneaked up and tackled him from behind.

The Richer, the Poorer Stories, Sketches and Reminiscences By Dorothy West Doubleday, 252 pages, $22 Once, arriving at the municipal swimming pool, I laced my hands into the chain link fence and watched a solitary lifeguard in a navy blue tank suit practice dives off the three-meter board. She was not beautiful and none of the dives was difficult. But even as a child I realized that what I was seeing was perfect. Precise, relaxed, she sprang lightly, head hung down, and slid into the water like a knife.

In spite of her size (she's only 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs barely 100 pounds), graffiti artist Lady Pink managed to muscle her way into the male-chauvinist territory of renegade street artists. How she did it will be a portion of her lecture Wednesday in the School of the Art Institute. But she says she would rather let her paintings speak for her than speak in front of the audience, because part of her younger self still lingers in spite of her bravado. Lady Pink remembers herself as a shy, quiet child.

It's one of the great urban nightmares: You are running out of gas and are forced to leave the expressway only to find yourself in a frightening neighborhood where you meet a gang of thugs. That's the fate that befalls Stefanie Powers, Helen Shaver and Kathleen Robertson in "Survive the Night" (8 p.m. Wednesday, USA cable), a silly movie with some of the most stereotypical bad guys you'll ever meet; a futuristic city setting filled with more graffiti than a 1980s New York City subway car; all sorts of mayhem; and a we've-had-enough-so-let's-fight-back finale in which the women turn the warehouse in which they are hiding into a death trap for their tormentors, using tricks that MacGyver or Macaulay Culkin would envy.